Thirty years ago today, Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon
outside of the Dakota apartment house near Central Park. Howard
Cosell, in his trademark staccato cadence, broke the news on Monday
Night Football: “A unspeakable tragedy, confirmed to us by ABC News
in New York: John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the
West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all the
Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital,
dead…on…arrival.”
In six wild months during 1980 and 1981, assassins took aim at
the pop star, the president, and the pope. It seemed like the
chaotic 1960s all over again, save for the fact that its symbol had
been gunned down.
Unlike Michael Jackson, whose last impression was that of a
ghoulish pervert standing before a judge, or Elvis Presley, who
went out as an overmedicated, bloated casino act, Lennon left us
wanting more rather than less. After five years away, the adopted
New Yorker returned to the limelight in 1980 with an album and
single that topped the charts, albeit posthumously. John Lennon
enjoyed an encore befitting of a Beatle.
Perhaps eclipsing that public encore were the changes in his
personal life. After stumbling through a haze of drugs and alcohol
in the 1970s, a sober Lennon returned to wife Yoko Ono, finally
succeeded in starting a family with her, and lived the quiet life
of a “househusband” from 1975 to 1980. Fatherhood the first time
around had eluded the essentially fatherless Lennon. Removed from
Beatlemania hysteria, Lennon had been for son Sean what he hadn’t
been for son Julian: a dad.
His musical comeback owed as much to the comeback of his
personal life as it had to his renewed focus on rock ‘n’ roll to
the exclusion of politics and drugs. Politics, Lennon concluded,
had “almost ruined” his music. “It became journalism and not
poetry. And I basically feel that I’m a poet — even if it does go
ba-deeble, eedle, eedle, it, de-deedle, deedle, it.” That
politicized John Lennon — holding bed-ins for peace, singing for
marijuana offender John Sinclair, featuring activists Bobby Seale,
Ralph Nader, and Jerry Rubin on The Mike Douglas Show
during a guest-hosting stint — coincided with the chemicalized
John Lennon. The stringy-haired beardo rhapsodizing about imagining
no religion was John Lennon. But so too was the leather-clad child
of the fifties belting out a stripped-down cover of “Stand By
Me.”
His radicalism was more consistently musical than political. He
was constantly trying to get back to the roots of rock ‘n’ roll.
“If we want to go bullshitting off into intellectualism with rock
& roll,” he explained to Jann Wenner in 1971, “then we are
going to get bullshitting rock intellectualism. If we want real
rock & roll, it’s up to all of us to create it and stop being
hyped by the revolutionary image and long hair.” This may seem an
odd statement coming from the creator of “Revolution 9.” But the
bare-bones sound of his early solo recordings — “Mother,”
“Isolation,” and “God” — reflected this lack of pretension. So too
do straight-forward fun rockers such as “Whatever Gets You Thru the
Night” (#1) and “Instant Karma!” (#3).
John Lennon once said if the music he played hadn’t been dubbed
“rock ‘n’ roll,” “Chuck Berry” would have been a suitable
alterative name. He explained to Rolling Stone, “No group,
be it Beatles, Dylan, or Stones, have ever improved on ‘Whole Lot
of Shaking,’ for my money.” He overtly paid tribute to his fifties
heroes in his 1975 covers record, Rock ‘n’ Roll. More
subtly, he did so in his periodic Teddy-Boy haircut and his second
and final solo #1, “(Just Like) Starting Over,” a sonic homage to
the early days of rock ‘n’ roll in which Lennon apes the vocal
styles of Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison.
He came to regret the early 1970s politicization of his art.
“That radicalism was phony, really, because it was out of guilt,”
Lennon recalled a few months before his assassination. “I’d always
felt guilty that I made money, so I had to give it away or lose it.
I don’t mean I was a hypocrite. When I believe, I believe right
down to the roots. But being a chameleon, I became whoever I was
with. When you stop and think: what the hell was I doing fighting
with the American government just because Jerry Rubin couldn’t get
what he always wanted — a nice cushy job?”
“Politics plays hell with your poetry,” revolutionary John Reed
once concluded. Before he died on December 8, 1980, musical
revolutionary John Lennon learned that lesson, too.
